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Seeking latitude to press liberal causes, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs distances itself from federations
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the onetime standard-bearer for outreach to the non-Jewish world whose influence has waned, is loosening its financial and organizational ties to the Jewish Federations of North America in a bid to reassert its traditional role.
The decision announced Monday to go it alone, announced in a press release and a two-page brochure that will go out to Jewish organizations, will free the JCPA to pursue liberal agenda items that are favored by American Jews but can alienate or unsettle donors to the federation system who are more conservative or at least more cautious about maintaining an appearance of being nonpartisan.
The decision marks a resolution to tensions that surged in 2020, when JCPA was among 600 Jewish groups to sign onto a full-page New York Times ad declaring “Black Lives Matter.” That set off alarms among some conservative donors because of the anti-Israel positions adopted by some of the Black Lives Matter movement’s leading individuals and organizations.
As a result, JCPA and JFNA entered into talks about their shared future. Insiders said last year, as tensions burst into public view, that it was likely that the ailing JCPA would fold wholly into JFNA.
Instead, after a process that included officials from both groups as well as from local Jewish community relations councils, which are mostly controlled by their local Jewish federations, the decision was to tease apart the organizations. The decision means that JCPA will no longer officially speak on behalf of the community relations councils, and also will not draw dues from them or from the 16 national organizations that have funded it up to now.
But while the group will take on a fundraising challenge, those who engineered the new structure say it will also be insulated from the difficulties of arriving at a consensus in an increasingly polarized political environment.
Rabbi Doug Kahn, the retired longtime director of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council who was a consultant in the restructuring, said the new arrangement is meant to offer a positive answer to the question, “Can we move forward in a way that enables us to be more impactful on our core issues, and more nimble at the same time, while retaining close relationships with our key stakeholders going forward?”
Rori Pickler Neiss, who heads the St. Louis JCRC, was among a number of local community relations council directors who had lost hope that the JCPA could adequately represent them. Now she said, she was hopeful it could resume its role of convening a national Jewish consensus around critical issues.
“The model of consensus-building in the way that some of the mainstream organizations talk about it has really been consensus towards a very narrow group of voices that wants to claim representation of the entire Jewish community,” she said. The newly constituted JCPA “is opening itself up to what could be greater consensus in a sense of a much broader community than many of our models have allowed for.”
The brochure tied to the split indicates some of the issues on which the renewed JCPA will advocate. “JCPA will represent a strong independent voice within the American Jewish community on issues aimed at strengthening our democracy and commitment to an inclusive and just society out of the belief that such conditions are essential in a pluralistic society and for the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel,” it said. “The reset takes place against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, racism, bigotry and hate, and polarization, and continued threats to our democracy.”
The group is launching two new initiatives, both apparently likely to dismay conservatives. One would focus on “voting rights, election integrity, disinformation, extremism as a threat to democracy, and civics education.” The other would focus on “racial justice, criminal justice reform and gun violence, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, and fighting hate violence.”
Some of the 16 groups that have paid dues to the JCPA in the past are supporting the restructured group. The new JCPA will rely at first on a three-year commitment from the UJA Federation of New York, one of the biggest pillars of the JFNA.
It’s not clear yet how the more conservative among the 16 groups will react. Nathan Diament, the Washington director for the Orthodox Union, said his group would wait and see how the new JCPA develops. But he said he regretted the polarization that led to the change.
“The trajectory of that JCPA is a reflection of the of the broader trend, more than anything about the JCPA itself,” Diament said. “It’s harder to find consensus these days with regards to Israel, it’s harder to find consensus with regard to a large list of domestic policy matters. I mean, even while we were in the JCPA we were in the position of having to dissent on some prominent issues.”
David Bohm, the current JCPA chairman who led the restructuring talks, said the organization would remain nonpartisan — but acknowledged that it’s become harder to maintain the perception.
“In today’s polarized environment, people get accused of being partisan when they take a stand on any issue, so I don’t know if that can be totally avoided,” he said in an interview.
The JFNA in a statement welcomed the new configuration. “We look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with JCPA — as we always have — as it tackles issues of importance to Jewish communities in its new format.”
In an interview, Elana Broitman, JFNA’s senior vice president for public affairs, said the new configuration would allow the JCPA to delve deeper on its favored issues. “If the JCPA is focused on particular issues, they can perhaps go into more depth on those issues that they had the opportunity to before,” she said.
In the past, the JCPA has taken positions on issues like voting rights, gun control, immigration rights and abortion, because they were favored by the local JCRCs with which it consulted and which sent delegates to its annual conference. Those JCRCs often initiated liberal policies, in part because they were favored by an American Jewish grassroots that polls show trends overwhelmingly liberal.
Another factor was the give and take in local community relations: Jewish groups seeking support for Jewish issues from Black, Latino, Asian American and other minority groups were happy to reciprocate on those groups’ favored issues.
But the JCPA’s profile on those issues has diminished in recent years; the smaller donor base triggered by the 2008 recession forced the vast majority of JCRCs to fold into their local federations, and to reflect the priorities of the federation donor base as opposed to the congregations, Jewish labor groups and fraternal organizations that once drove the agenda for Jewish community relations.
Tensions between the JCPA and the JFNA intensified in the summer of 2020, after a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, triggering civil rights protests and the “Black Lives Matter” ad by Jewish groups that JCPA signed onto.
The JFNA CEO, Eric Fingerhut, insiders said then, was not happy about having to explain to donors why JCPA was embracing a group identified closely with a movement perceived by some conservatives as radical and anti-Israel.
The new JCPA is betting that there are donors ready to support a progressive domestic Jewish lobby. In addition to the three-year grant from UJA-Federation, two other grants will come from a past chairwoman of the JCPA, Lois Frank, and its current chairman, Bohm.
Bohm, an attorney who assumed leadership of the JCPA in 2021, said the group would take a hit by losing the JFNA’s allocations and the dues it collects from the 125 community relations councils — but he expected to make it up with money from foundations invested in the the JCPA’s new agenda, including from individual federations.
“We expect we may lose some funding,” he said. “We’re hoping it’s not significant.”
“We are beginning to hear from foundations that have not historically necessarily focused on community relations, but now recognize why that is such an important part in the toolkit,” Kahn added.
Bohm said the board would be independent and limited to 30 people. “We will continue to have board members who are either JCRC directors or current or past chairs of JCRCs, but they will not be representing their specific community,” he said in an email after the interview. “Instead they will represent the Jewish community relations field as a whole.”
JCPA’s annual budget is now less than $2 million, Kahn said, down from nearly $4 million in 2015, and its staff has dropped from 13 in the 2000s to four. The group is seeking a fifth staffer now and hope eventually to employ at least 13.
Beyond polarization, a number of factors have been at play in diminishing the role of consensus-based Jewish community relations. There has been a flourishing of single-issue nonprofit groups, many of them Jewish, that are more attractive to donors than general interest groups.
Kahn noted that in the mid-1990s when many of the agenda items the national Jewish community pursued for decades seemed to be resolving themselves: Peace was breaking out between Israel and its neighbors, the Soviet Union collapsed and freed its Jews to travel, immigration reform was on track and race relations appeared to be improving.
“There was this shift from focusing on the external challenges or threats to more of the internal threats within the Jewish community,” he said, referring to an emphasis on Jewish education to counter assimilation.
The fragility of the hopes for peace and democratic growth in the 1990s were made evident in subsequent years with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the eruption of the Second Intifada and the rise of nativist sentiment and its attendant bigotries, culminating in the Trump presidency.
Kahn said his hope was that the JCPA would once again assume the role it played from 1944, when it was founded as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council: raising Holocaust awareness and taking the lead in promoting immigration in the late 1940s, establishing the Black-Jewish alliance in the 1950s, defending Israel in the 1960s, and advocating for Soviet Jewry until the USSR’s collapse.
He saw hope in the turnout of non-Jewish support for Jews after the recent deadly attacks on Jewish institutions, including the gunman who massacred 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh in 2018. “I think this model will enable that kind of solidarity-building around issues of common cause to grow infinitely greater than it’s been able to, up until now,” he said.
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Trump Plans to Appoint US General to Lead Gaza Security Force: Report
A drone view shows Palestinians walking past the rubble, following Israeli forces’ withdrawal from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, Oct. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
The Trump administration is planning to appoint an American two-star general to command the International Stabilization Force in Gaza, Axios reported on Thursday, citing two US officials and two Israeli officials.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.
A United Nations Security Council resolution, adopted on Nov. 17, authorized a Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish a temporary International Stabilization Force in Gaza.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, who visited Israel this week, told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials that the Trump administration is going to lead the ISF and appoint a two-star general as its commander, Axios said.
The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that an announcement about which world leaders will serve on the Gaza Board of Peace should be made early next year.
The resolution, drafted by the US, described the Board of Peace as a transitional administration “that will set the framework, and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” in line with Trump’s 20-point peace plan to end the war with terrorist group Hamas.
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Al Jazeera’s Academic Arm Denies Hamas Sexual Violence and Other Crimes
The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon
Al Jazeera Centre for Studies — the research arm of Qatar’s state-backed media giant — co-hosted an academic conference last week in Qatar’s Education City that whitewashed Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, and dismissed UN-verified sexual violence and other terrorist acts as Israeli fabrications.
Al Jazeera partnered with Hamad Bin Khalifa University to host the November 29-30 gathering, titled “International Media and the War on Gaza: Modalities of Discourse and the Clash of Narratives,” which drew academics to “deconstruct Western narratives” and the alleged role of Western media outlets in producing “propaganda manipulating international public opinion.”
In a seven-page concept note describing the goals of the conference, Al Jazeera’s organizers charged the Western media with justifying “Israel’s right to self-defense” and spreading “propaganda” about terrorist groups like Hamas, which they refer to as a “Palestinian resistance faction.” The organizers also attacked media outlets for writing about what it refers to as “false reports” about Hamas terrorists “raping Israeli women.”
During Hamas’ assault on Israel, terrorists systematically employed sexual violence as a weapon of war, including rape against women and girls. A New York Times investigation detailed at least seven locations where Hamas terrorists committed such acts, including gang rape and genital mutilation. In December 2023, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Hamas’ use of sexual violence and described it as “beyond anything I’ve seen.”
According to the Dina Project, an Israeli group of legal and gender experts, Hamas used sexual violence in its massacre “as part of a genocidal scheme” meant to “dehumanize Israeli society.”
The organizers’ concept note and the conference’s program made no reference to Hamas’ genocidal charter, its embedding of military assets in civilian areas, or the terrorist group’s responsibility for prolonging the conflict. The conference instead provided a platform for Al Jazeera journalists and academics to explain away Hamas terrorism and denigrate Israel.
While it operates under strict Qatari media laws that limit free speech and freedom of expression, making criticism of the Emir and his policies punishable by law, Al Jazeera’s Centre for Studies refers to itself as an “independent research institution that aims to present a balanced understanding of the geopolitics of the MENA region and the Arab world in particular.” While it seeks to appeal to an audience with Western sensibilities, the center is far from the public-facing independent institution that it presents itself to be.
The center was established in 2006 to “provide research support to the editorial teams, correspondents and departments of Al Jazeera’s news channels.”
Al Jazeera Organizers and Speakers Push Hamas’s Agenda
Arafat Madi Shoukri, who works as a senior researcher for the Centre for Studies, organized the conference. In 2013, Shoukri was designated as a Hamas operative by Israel for his work with the Hamas-aligned Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).
Shoukri has been photographed with Ismail Haniyeh, one of the architects of the October 7 massacre. He also directed the London-based Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), an organization with extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has national branches that promote violent jihad and Hamas. In 2010, then-Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared the PRC an “illegal association,” referring to it as a “Hamas affiliated organization” that engages in “terror affiliated activities.”
The conference featured as its keynote speaker Wadah Khanfar, a former director general of Al Jazeera, who has been linked to Hamas fundraising efforts, with evidence suggesting he helped coordinate Hamas paramilitary activity in South Africa. According to the Raya Media Network, a Palestinian outlet, Khanfar was “active in the Hamas movement” and a “leader in the movement’s office in Sudan.”
In May 2024, Khanfar praised Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, proclaiming it “came at the perfect moment for a radical and real shift in the path of struggle and liberation.” Khanfar had a close relationship to the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who leveraged Al Jazeera’s global reach to endorse terrorism against Jews, Israelis, and Americans and spread antisemitic narratives. Khanfar eulogized him at his funeral.
“There is a betrayal of the values of justice through capitalist savagery,” Khanfar said during his lecture, titled “The Grand Narratives of Western Media in Covering the War on Gaza: Manifestations of Political and Ideological Domination.” His lecture attacked Israel for “hastening the fall” of Western civilization, while ignoring Israel’s strategic role as a democratic anchor for the West in a mostly volatile and authoritarian region of the world.
Campus Reform reports that professor Ibrahim Abusharif, who spoke at the conference, co-founded and served as treasurer of the Quranic Literacy Institute, which was “later found by a federal jury to have laundered more than $1 million to Hamas” in a terrorism financing case. The publication reported that Abusharif taught the mandatory “Doha Seminar” for all American exchange students at Northwestern’s Qatar campus.
Mutaz al-Khatib, director of the Master’s Programme in Applied Islamic Ethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Islamic Studies, spoke at the conference on “professional ethics” in war coverage. On the day of Hamas’ October 7 massacre, al-Khatib posted on Facebook that, “What happened was merely a rehearsal that shows that liberating Jerusalem is possible.”
Fatima Alsmadi, a researcher at the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, moderated a session and presented on Hamas spokesperson Abu Obaida’s “impact on international public opinion.” Abu Obaida, who was killed in an IDF strike in August 2025, reportedly employed “psychological warfare games against Israel” and attempted to make Westerners more “sympathetic” to Hamas.
Alsmadi claimed in her lecture that Israel has somehow “benefited” from Nazism. She praised Hamas propaganda efforts employed by Abu Obaida that weaponize Nazi imagery against Israel, seemingly endorsing a media strategy that perversely brands Israel as a Nazi state to legitimize Hamas terrorism and invert historical truth.
In the same session, Manal Mazahreh, an associate professor of mass communication at the University of Petra, in Jordan, claimed that, “The Jews are largely controlling the media in the world,” repeating an antisemitic trope used to justify hostility toward Jews.
In one session, Eman Barakat, an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology in Yemen, described the Israeli government’s social media presence as “digital warfare” and claimed it has manipulated public perceptions by labeling Hamas as “pure evil” and an “illegitimate group.”
Barakat focused her presentation on Israel Speaks Arabic, a Facebook page with more than three million followers. She assessed that the page described Hamas as “morally degraded,” “lowly,” and “cowardly,” and highlighted the group’s involvement in criminal and murderous activity. She warned her audience that such language “makes you imagine things” and might lead users to believe that “maybe what they are saying is true.” Barakat dismissed Hamas’ history of brutality and terrorism not only against Israel but against Palestinians and others.
Freedom House evaluates Qatar as “Not Free” in its annual Freedom of the World report.
Al Jazeera sells its content to major wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters. Al Jazeera has resource-sharing agreements
Until Doha stops using its universities and state media to whitewash terrorism, American institutions and companies need to reconsider their relationship with all platforms in Al Jazeera’s vast ecosystem. Continued partnerships and collaboration from Western organizations only emboldens the next denial and further justification for violence.
Toby Dershowitz is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Asher Boiskin is an intern. Follow them on X @TobyDersh and @asherboiskin
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US House Backs Massive Defense Policy Bill, Senate Next
A US soldier keeps watch at an Afghan National Army base in Logar province, Afghanistan August 5, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Omar Sobhani/File Photo
The US House of Representatives passed a massive defense policy bill on Wednesday authorizing a record $901 billion in annual military spending, paving the way for the must-pass measure to become law for a 65th straight year.
The tally was 312-112 in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, sending it for consideration by the US Senate, which is expected to pass it next week.
The $901 billion in defense spending is $8 billion more than President Donald Trump’s request earlier this year.
The NDAA also provides $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine in each of the next two years and includes other measures reinforcing the US commitment to Europe’s defense, reflecting most lawmakers’ continuing strong support for Kyiv as it fights Russian invaders.
The sweeping 3,086-page bill unveiled on Sunday includes measures to make life better for the troops, including a 4% pay raise and improvements in base housing. But it does not include insurance coverage for military families to get fertility treatments, including embryo transfers for in vitro fertilization, something opposed by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a social conservative.
The legislation is a compromise between versions of the NDAA passed earlier this year by the Senate and House, both controlled by Trump’s Republicans. Members of both parties urged lawmakers to support it even if they objected to individual provisions.
“I do support this bill. This does not mean that I do not have concerns. I do,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, in a speech before the vote.
SPENDING LEVELS
Trump in May asked Congress for a national defense budget of $892.6 billion for fiscal year 2026, flat compared with 2025. The House bill set spending at that level, but the Senate had authorized $925 billion.
The NDAA authorizes Pentagon programs, but does not fund them. Congress must separately pass funding in a spending bill for the fiscal year ending in September 2026.
In addition to the typical NDAA provisions on defense acquisitions and competition with rivals like China and Russia, this year’s bill focuses on cutting programs reviled by Trump, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
The NDAA is one of a few major pieces of legislation to make it through Congress every year and lawmakers take pride in having passed it annually since 1961.
This year’s process was a bit rockier than usual.
The rule paving the way for the House vote passed earlier on Wednesday by only 215 to 211 after a long delay in which a few Republicans changed their votes from “no” to “yes.”
Trump has said he will sign the NDAA into law once it reaches the White House.